The Blog "Reflections on Family History Affected by Nazi Crimes" let members of the "Amicale française de Neuengamme et de ses Kommandos" speak. Today: Yvonne Cossu-Alba.

72 years ago, Yvonne Cossu-Alba’s life changed forever. She was eight years old when, on October 19, 1943, members of the Vichy militia together with the Gestapo arrested her father Robert Alba. He had been the leader of the French Résistance in the Crozon peninsula in Brittany. 18 months later, Robert Alba died in the Sandbostel reception camp to which he had been taken in April 1945 together with 9000 other prisoners of the Neuengamme concentration camp.

For the families of concentration camp prisoners around the world Yvonne Cossu-Alba has some advice:

Write about your relative. Even if you think it is for your own benefit only, it might still be useful for a larger audience. Your own experience, your way of thinking and describing facts might be of some help to other people. Every single story about a prisoner helps us finding and re-building the historical truth. It can spark an interest in the younger generations enticing them to learn more and, ultimately, to fight modern-day racism and fascism.

The whole story: http://rfhabnc.org/every-story-and-every-voice-counts/

Reflections on Family History affected by Nazi Crimes aims to bring about projects that respond to the question “How do we want to remember the past in the future?” We offer a virtual meeting place for descendants of former concentration camp prisoners, resisters, bystanders and perpetrators seeking to engage constructively with their families’ history through contributing their views and ideas to a dialogue that acknowledges the different experiences of their families while emphasizing the shared interest of contributing to a meaningful culture of remembrance:

http://rfhabnc.org/about-us/